Contemporary European Theatre

Got two new books out, innit? I was in Hong Kong a couple of years ago and one of the people I was speaking to said how much they liked Contemporary European Theatre Directors, which I edited with Maria Delgado in 2010, ‘but now we need the same thing about playwrights’. And I thought that’s a very good idea. Maria and I started planning and brought on board my brilliant colleague Bryce Lease, who has great expertise on Eastern European theatre. Four years later (it’s a very big book) here it is. 21 chapters, a substantial introduction, a foreword by Tiago Rodrigues and an afterword by David Greig, it features 39 different playwrights from 18 different European countries, pretty much all of whom have emerged over the last 30 years. Most chapters pair different playwrights together, to compare and contrast their work’s journeys across different European theatre cultures, exploring what the new encounters between play and culture reveals about the play, the culture, and perhaps Europe itself. I’ve written a long chapter about European playwriting 1945-1989 that forms a kind of prelude to the bulk of the book.

At the same time, Routledge asked if we wanted to do a second edition of the Directors volume, which we were very happy to do. Each chapter has been revised and updated - my chapter on Katie Mitchell had a lot of new work to take in - and there are three new chapters on Deborah Warner, Ivo Van Hove and Krzysztof Warlikowski, plus a new preface by Mark Ravenhill. The book’s been rejacketed to make it uniform with the new Playwrights volume.

Available from all the usual places.

Play Podcasts

I’m a guest on two episodes of a new podcast - The Play Podcast, hosted by Douglas Schatz. Each episode is a conversation with a guest about a different play. I’m on episodes 1 and 8 talking about Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, respectively. Each episode is an hour and Douglas is a charming, informed host. Enjoy!

• A Doll’s House

• The Deep Blue Sea

Back to the Eggpod

A couple of years ago, I went on the superb Beatles podcast I am the Eggpod to discuss the final Beatles album, Let It Be. Well I’m back again and now discussing the final Wings album, Back to the Egg. Once again, it’s a conversation with the marvellous host of the show, Chris Shaw. I make a case for the merits of this record; we rhapsodise over Paul’s bass playing; we ask how punk Paul ever got; speculate on why Wings split up; disagree on ‘Theme from Rockestra’; and generally have a good old time.

You can listen to it HERE.

Happy Talk

I’ve done a bunch of talks over the summer and I’m noting them here, in part because this website is a kind of aide memoire for me. The title slides are above, but the fuller information is below:

• ‘Do Not Perform This Play’, keynote to Analysing Plays symposium, Royal Holloway (at Goldsmiths, 5 July 2019)

• ‘When One Door Closes, Another Door Opens: The “disgusting art-theatre project” of Naturalism’ Mapping the Past into the Future: A Celebration of the Work of Jacky Bratton, University of Manchester, Tuesday 10th September 2019

• ‘Danger! Craftsman at Work: Secrets from the Rattigan Archive’ British Library, 17 September 2019

• ‘Henrik Ibsen: Maker of Modern Theatre’, National Theatre, 19 September 2019

• ‘The Strange Success of Naturalist Theatre’, Bedford School, 23 September 2019

Programmatic

I did a bunch of programme notes earlier this year. One for each of the excellent Rattigan productions at the Orange Tree and Chichester Festival Theatre and another for Sam Adamson’s lovely play Wife at the Kiln. All these productions have now closed so I thought I’d share what I wrote with you.

• While the Sun Shines

• The Deep Blue Sea

• Wife

Radio Drama

Yours truly, during the recording of Lorenzaccio

The BBC Writers Room is the organisation that encourages and develops writers who haven’t written for the BBC before. It does excellent work and works hard to bring writers into the Corporation, shares scripts, offers guidance and advice, runs workshops and more.

I was asked to write something for the blog about writing for radio and my piece is now up on the website. It begins with some reflections on my most recent script, Lorenzaccio, the challenges of that particular play, the solutions we came up with, and then offers some thoughts on the value of radio drama, its distinctive excitement for the writer, and the importance of getting good collaborators.

You can read it here:

• BBC Writers Room Blog

Audition Speeches

The blessed National Youth Theatre have published a collection of audition speeches drawn from plays they have premiered over their 50-year life. It’s a clever move because most of those speeches are for young people and it’s often young adults who are auditioning (for drama schools, etc.). Many of the plays are unpublished too, so students using the book will be offering some unfamiliar and original work to those auditions. (Unless, of course, the book is a huge hit and these monologues become wearily familiar.)

I’m thrilled that there’s a monologue by me in there. It’s from Outright Terror Bold and Brilliant, which I wrote for the National Youth Theatre in 2005, in direct response to the London Bombings. I still think it’s the first theatrical response to those terrible events.

The book is nicely produced and includes introductions to each monologue, giving context for the speech, and offering some thoughts on character and interpretation. It is available in all good bookshops and also Amazon.

Chekhov Awake

Drama school students at the University of the Arts, Saint Martins, are doing my play Chekhov in Hell this week at the Platform Theatre, Kings Cross.

Jonny Humphreys directs and the cast is Ojan Genc, Natasha Howard, Joshua Dunn, Dannie Harris, Olivier Huband, Naomi Tankel, Eleanor Barrett, James Warburton, Matthew George-Williams, Jules Chan, Prudence Prescott, Jack Trueman, Laetitia Valstar. The show runs till Saturday. I’ll be there on Friday and I’m looking forward to seeing how the play stands up almost a decade on.

You can get tickets here: https://www.arts.ac.uk/whats-on/ba-acting-autumn-shows-chekhov-in-hell

Da Capo

The Arvon Foundation is an organisation dedicated to encouraging people to explore their creativity as novelists, playwrights, poets, songwriters, and much more. They run residential courses, workshops, from individuals, schools and more. And they’ve been doing this for 50 years.

To mark that anniversary, they’ve produced a book, gathering in short writings by some of their tutors to reflect on Arvon’s work and produce work inspired by it.

I’ve tutored six times for Arvon, running courses on Radio Drama, usually with Polly Thomas and Eloise Whitmore. These courses are a week long and we take our students through the process of developing a radio play idea, a short section of which is then recorded and professionally edited. It’s always a delightful week and a great, tough but rewarding process; the students come from all walks of life, are usually ferociously committed, and it’s a pleasure to work on, though I always come back exhausted. Last week I taught another course at the Arvon Centre at Totleigh Barton in Devon with a wonderfully creative and engaged group of students.

I was asked to contribute to the book and I wrote ‘Da Capo’, a short dramatic dialogue that is, on one level, about tutoring creative writing but also contains the instruction that it repeats at which point the piece becomes a kind of infinite Möbius Strip, and reflects something about the reciprocal and mutual nature of nurturing the imagination.

You can get hold of the book here: https://www.arvon.org/about/golden-book/

The Complete Works of Shakespeare

There's a conference coming up next month on Shakespeare and/as Philosophy, organised by Jessica Chiba and Richard Ashby. They were keen to have input on this topic from a theatre maker, not just academics, and we were delighted that Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, was happy to participate. He couldn't make the dates of the conference, so we arranged that I would interview him on video which will be shown and then responded to during the conference. 

The reason for Tim being particularly appropriate is the wonderful Forced Entertainment project, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, in which, over the course of several days, the company retell the stories of Shakespeare's plays, each taking around 45 minutes, and using household objects to stand in for the characters. It's an enchanting concept and the results are - perhaps surprisingly - gripping, affectionate, and moving. Perhaps also surprising is that you start to realise that this is really what all theatre is like and realistic representation is a fairly marginal thing in theatre.

We discussed the development of the project, the agency and artistry of objects, their role as bearers of emotion, the nature of character, the role of the storyteller, the effect on the audience, and what it told Tim about Shakespeare. The video is being edited by Jessica Chiba and you can watch it here:

• Tim Etchells Interview

Katie Mitchell

I'm in conversation with Kim Solga in this new book:

Fowler, Benjamin, ed. The Theatre of Katie Mitchell. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. 

We're discussing Katie Mitchell's relation to Naturalism and feminism and the politics of that encounter. It's based on the video conversation we had, available of Digital Theatre Plus, and makes it more widely available (not everyone has access to Digital Theatre).

The format is that I talk first about her relationship to historical Naturalism; then Kim talks about the developing nature of Mitchell's feminism and then we discuss aspects of her work together and cover some interesting points, I think. The transcript is slightly emended, to add references and correct some egregious stylistic howlers, but it retains the feel of a conversation, making it easily readable.

It's the first of a series of publications based on the 4x45 video series (4 x 45' interviews and talks) and it's great to be part of the opening of that series. Our section is:

Rebellato, Dan, and Kim Solga. 'Katie Mitchell and the Politics of Naturalist Theatre.' The Theatre of Katie Mitchell. Ed. Fowler, Benjamin. 4x45. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. 39-71. Print.

Consent

I'm very proud to have been involved in drawing up some new guidelines on preventing sexual harassment in university drama departments. 

It started after I wrote a blog about Max Stafford-Clark and various people got in touch with their own stories. One that particularly shocked me concerned a visiting tutor in the pub after a class who made an arrangement to give a student an interview later, at which he then assaulted her. It got me wondering whether we had any guidelines on what we considered acceptable behaviour. Not because I think sexual assaults are ubiquitous in our discipline, but because Drama involves some activities that are important to the discipline but, without clear ground rules, could be exploited. 

It turned out we didn't, so SCUDD (the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments) suggested a group be convened to draw up these guidelines.

I worked with Geraldine Harris, who's a friend, but also whom I saw lead a brilliant session at a conference 25 years ago on the way certain classroom exercises (contact improvisation, trust exercises, etc.) may falsely assume they are neutral but actually might need to be rethought. We convened a diverse group of colleagues from a range of institutions and at various levels of seniority. The full group comprised Leonie Elliot-Graves (Goldsmiths), Stephen Greer (Glasgow), Adelina Ong (Central), Karen Savage (Lincoln), Pedro de Senna (Middlesex), plus me and Gerry. And over a series of meetings and drafts, we produced a crisp, clear and I hope helpful set of guidelines.

There are complexities involved in these things. First, all institutions will have their own guidelines, so ours are discipline-specific suggestions for best practice. Second, all institutions will have their own disciplinary procedures, which ours are not intended to contribute to, so ours are meant to be preventative, not disciplinary. Third, it is not illegal for students and staff to have sexual contact, so it is not our business to ban something that isn't against the law; we are focused on abuses of trust and of the discipline.

While I guess we mostly had staff preying on students in our heads, we were mindful that students can harass other students, that it could be technicians, administrators, visiting tutors, workshop leaders, and others who become involved in acts of harassment and assault. In some cases, it would be possible for a student to sexually harass a member of staff too. Our guidelines are intended to be of broad application.

What emerged very clearly from our work was the importance of collective responsibility and of consent; collective responsibility because it is wrong that the responsibility and time and emotional labour fall only on those who have been subjected to harassment; we should share the job of keeping our spaces safe for our colleagues and students by agreeing common principles of behaviour and working together to address any breaches of those principles. And consent because it's easy to assume that consent has been given when a student enters a class, but consent needs to be informed (do they know what they are agreeing to), specific (agreeing to participate in a 'physical theatre class' doesn't mean they consent to being touched, for example),  voluntary (they mustn't be pressured into giving it), explicit (students should not be judged to have consented by walking into a room or by not objecting to something), and time-bound (consent is not a blank cheque; as the exercise changes and develops, check in on the consent).

The draft guidelines have been shared with all of SCUDD's member institutions and we got a lot of feedback from them, which we've incorporated. The guidelines have been sent to SCUDD who will formally adopt them and recommend that all member departments also adopt them and, most important I think, share them with their students so everyone understands that our discipline does not tolerate harassment.

So I'm very proud of what we've achieved.

You can read the guidelines here:

• Guidelines for Preventing Sexual Harassment

And there's an article by Gerry and me in The Stage which you can read here:

• New harassment guidelines: Consent must be at the heart of university drama teaching

And Matt Hemley's written a short news story about the guidelines:

• Guidelines produced to prevent sexual harassment in university drama departments

Theatre & Class

I recently worked with the director Chris Haydon, supervising a piece of research he carried out as part of his Clore Fellowship. He was interested in the problem of class in British theatre; the exclusion of working class audiences and the privileging of the middle class.

Chris worked through a mixture of reading and interviews, conducting some site visits to some really innovative theatres across England and Wales. The report is excellent, I think, and makes a series of really strong and powerful recommendations for making theatres more inclusive, welcoming places that speak to working-class audiences in a way they mostly don't do now.

The final report is called Where are the Workers? An investigation into the class diversity of British theatre audiences and you can read it on the Clore website:

• Where are the workers?

If you have the attention span of a mollusc and can't read the full thing, you absolute shower of a person, he's written a much shorter piece for The Stage about the same thing.

• The Stage.

.@realDonaldTrump Night night, you disgusting halfwit. xx

A couple of years ago, Donald Trump had just about secured the nomination as Republican candidate in the Presidential campaign. I was living in Paris and had watched with a mixture of amusement, bemusement and horror as he launched his campaign, descending a golden elevator before calling Mexicans rapists and drug-dealers. I decided to wish him good night. I typed 'Night night, you disgusting halfwit. xx' and went to bed. And I did it again the next night. And the next. And I've been doing it ever since.

Why? I don't know. It amuses me, the mixture of affection and insult, the cheeriness of it and the anger, the fact it's in my time zone not his, the discrepancy between his supreme power and my utter obscurity, the fact that he must have seen it a few times and may have had a moment of confusion. I'd been tweeting at Trump since he decided to become a leader of the Birther movement (the group of thinly-veiled racists who claimed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not Florida). My first tweet about him was in April 2011 and my first tweet to him was in November 2012 and I seem, looking in amazement at my tweet archive, to have tweeted to or about him over 3600 times.

And now Rowland Manthorpe of Wired magazine has written an article about my stupid nightly tweet. I'll be honest: when Rowland got in touch, I thought that either he was a bit mad or that he was going to denounce me. But we met and had a good conversation, full of laughter and interesting questions and the article is, I think, good. It doesn't make me sound like I think I'm doing something hugely important (which I don't), which was my biggest worry.

You can read it HERE

My only cavil is at being described as a troll. I mean, maybe that is accurate, but my experience of Twitter Trolls - and boy those MAGA-hat-wearing racists love to troll - is that they are usually anonymous and that's part of the threat. Since I use my own name on Twitter, I feel that's something different. No less needling and mocking, but not exactly trolling.

Lyn Gardner

Today The Stage has published an open letter to The Guardian protesting at its sacking of Lyn Gardner. Lyn has been a theatre critic for the newspaper for over 20 years and has been remarkable in her attention to the experimental, the cross-artform, to small companies, to regional theatre. While the paper's first-string critic, Michael Billington, is, of course, an important writer on the plays of national attention, Lyn complements this wonderfully offering a vision of the future.

The Guardian have decided not to renew her contract. I don't want to downplay The Guardian's problems; they, like a lot of journalism, are finding it hard to transition from a world of print, funded by newspaper buyers and print advertising, to a world of online news and diminishing, thinly-spread digital advertising. They do have to make cuts, but this, I think, is not where they should make them.

When the news broke last week, I drafted a letter fairly quickly and sent it round to a few friends and contacts asking them to add their names and to send it on to their lists. David Lan was the first to say yes and the names then started pouring in. Some of the signatories made valuable suggestions about changes to the text of the letter (particular thanks to Dennis Kelly and Tom Morris for improvements).

Eventually I had around 120 names, representing a huge range of British theatre, including the artistic directors of the Royal Court, the National Theatres of Scotland and Wales, The Bush, The Orange Tree, The Gate, The Yard, The Almeida, Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum, The Traverse, the Liverpool Everyman Playhouse, Bristol Old Vic, Manchester's Royal Exchange, Lancaster's The Dukes, Northern Stage, Chichester Festival Theatre, Contact Theatre, Forced Entertainment, Theatr Clywd, Battersea Arts Centre, Graeae, Out of Joint, Third Angel, Forest Fringe, Slung Low, Tamasha, Made in China, Improbable, Action Hero, Filter, Punchdrunk and more - plus individual artists and theatre makers including Tim Crouch, April De Angelis, Alistair McDowall, Tanya Moodie, Katie Mitchell, David Eldridge, Lucy Kirkwood, Wendy Houston, Lucy Prebble, Chris Goode, David Harrower, Lindsey Turner, Nic Green, Bryony Kimmings, Lou Brealey, Rory Mullarkey, Melly Still, Moira Buffini, Jack Thorne, James Graham, Zinnie Harris, Stephen Daldry, David Edgar, Duncan McMillan, Stella Duffy, Shelley Silas, Roy Williams and still more. More names have come in since I sent the letter off. At some points emails were coming in so thick and fast, I'm worried I ay have missed some. But it's a powerful statement of support - and it's not often you get thearre makers supporting a critic.

You can read a short article about the letter here and the text of the letter and full list of signatories here.

There's a Howard Barker play, A Hard Heart, in which a genius is charged with defending a city under siege. In transforming every aspect of the city into a technology for prosecuting a defensive counterattack, the city loses all of the values it was trying to defend. I'm reminded of that so often these days.

I hope The Guardian listen.

24 Stories

In the wake of the horrific fire at Grenfell Tower in West London last June, a plan was hatched for a book of original stories, edited by the wonderful Kathy Burke, that would be published in support of the survivors, particularly those suffering with trauma from the events of that night. And I was asked to contribute something. The brief was that the story had to be uplifting, positive, hopeful. And I think it had to be limited to 900 words or so. There would be 24 stories, one for each of the storeys of Grenfell.

So I wrote one. It marks my debut as a fiction writer - in a book alongside A. L. Kennedy and Pauline Melville and Irvine Welsh. Bloody HELL.

Mine is inspired by the story of Andrew Parker, a policeman who was on board the ill-fated cross-channel ferry The Herald of Free Enterprise which left the port of Zeebrugge in 1987 with her bow doors open and capsized. While it was lying on its side, passengers trying to get to a place from which they could be rescued, had their route interrupted by a six foot gap that they couldn't jump and Parker lay over the gap allowing the passengers to walk over his back to safety. Needless to say, apart from the outline, the character in my story is entirely invented.

It's out on 14 June, the first anniversary of the fire. You can buy it here:

• Hive
• Amazon

My Place or Yours? in Galway

I was extremely honoured to be invited to key a keymote address at the EDEN All-Island Postgraduate Conference at NUI Galway this week. The theme of the conference was Bodies and Borders and I saw a dazzling series of remarkable papers by postgraduate researchers, followed by excellent questions. A very high, indeed daunting standard.

My paper was ‘My Place or Yours? Reflections on Theatre, Borders and Brexit’ and I began by discussing Brexit and, specifically, the problem of the Irish border. This led to some reflections on the nature of border-drawing and the related (but not entailed) notion of national sovereignty. I I made a case for the inaptness of exclusionary national boundaries (of the kind people like Nigel Farage seem so romantically attached to). I noted that the Good Friday Agreement, which is imperilled by the British government's insistence on leaving the EU customs union and single market, is an imperfect document, which tends to foreclose on the plurality of identities in the North of Ireland and reify some rather conservative binaries. And yet, in its enshrinement of 'parity of esteem' there is the beginning of a deconstructive, relatviising attitude to identity that begins, just begins, to separate identity from nation, body and land. There are, of course, radical democrats who believe that the GFA should be dispensing with the very notion of cultural identity and on a certain theoretical level, I believe that myself. Of course, political theory and political practice can be rather different things and it's easy to think that the complex, ambiguous layering of provisional identities of the kind envisaged by radical democrats is an object of theoretical reflection but not, perhaps, an object of experience. Put more straightforwardly, we can imagine identity like that, but can we feel it?

And this is where the theatre comes in. Because typically in the theatre we experience identity and place as endlessly overlaid on one another. At the simplest level, when an actor plays a character there is an overlay of one identity over another; but even there, the actor's body is a visual echo of the other parts she or he has played, a kind of palimpsest, overwritten many times. And the character, too, is not a simple identity but, in the theatre, potentially reembodied and reinvented and reinterpreted limitless times. All identities in the theatre are ghosted and haunted and doubled and troubled. (And indeed the same is true of land; I rehearsed again Joanne Tompkins's argument about theatre as heterotopia, where the layered places - real world, theatre building, stage set and fictional world - interact in ways that open up and trouble the attachments and meanings of place in our lives, public and personal.

And to finish off, I then looked at a couple of recent plays which are set - unusually for British theatre - not in urban centres but in the country: Joe White's Mayfly (set in a village or small town in Shropshire) and Simon Longman's Gundog set on a farm, somewhere in England (and is, I think, one of the most exciting new plays I've seen in some years). I argued that both plays share a haunted sense of place, that their very spatial specificity creates a deconstructive energy that undermines the security of place. I also suggested that both plays share a structure of feeling that is mournful, melancholic, fearful, bleak but I am unsure whether that is a requiem for the nation or for the transcendence of nation.

There were some great questins afterward, the particular session chaired brilliantly by Patrick Lonergan. Galway is a beautiful city. I was taken from my hotel by the brilliant doctoral student Ciara Murphy along a gorgeous river and canal to the elegant university campus on a bright and beautiful day. It was a pleasure to attend and contribute to this superb conference.

David Eldridge in Conversation

I interviewed one of my favourite writers David Eldridge on stage at the Bloomsbury Institute on Tuesday 24 April. The good thing sbout the Bloomsbury events is when, as here, they weren't about selling a particular show or book. Instead we had 75 minutes to talk broadly and in some depth about the range of David's work from the first play of his I say, Serving It Up in 1996, to Beginning in 2017.

As ever David was candid, funny, precise, heartfelt and wise about writing and the writer's life. Bet you're sorry you missed it now.

Let It Be

I chat about The Beatles's (sort of) last album, Let It Be: a much-debated record - is it brilliant? is it crap? is it a nadir or a peak? What the hell is Dig It? What happened to Don't Let Me Down? What was Phil Spector thinking? I discuss it with the wonderful Chris Shaw on his smashing podcast I am the Eggpod.

You can listen at the link below:

• https://iamtheeggpod.com/2018/03/18/episode-four-dan-rebellato/

Rattigan's Lawrence

Two years ago, the Chichester Festival Theatre presented the first professional revival of Ross, Terence Rattigan's play about T. E. Lawrence, for 30 years. Joseph Fiennes led a large cast in this unusually epic Rattigan play. I did an introduction to a new edition published by Nick Hern Books to coincide with this production.

I also wrote a note for the programme, claiming that Rattigan's public, political side has been under-examined. Since the production is long gone and won't transfer, I thought I'd make that available. You can read it via the link below:

• Rattigan: Inside and Out